If you want to explore the surroundings, Soviet-era topographic maps are not only free, they're often the best topographic map available, usually at a scale of 1:200.000, often better. They're not optimal as city maps, and for city maps there are probably better sources available anyway. They're also quite dated, usually from the 1980s or older — a friend used them to walk from France to Mongolia, and at one point they suddenly came upon a large hydro power lake that wasn't on their map, so they had to make quite a big detour.

You will need to read the Cyrillic script.

The answers to my question over at GIS describe sources where these maps can be downloaded.

If you want to explore the surroundings, Soviet-era topographic maps are not only free, they're often the best topographic map available, usually at a scale of 1:200.000, often better. They're not optimal as city maps, and for city maps there are probably better sources available anyway. They're also quite dated, usually from the 1980s or older — a friend used them to walk from France to Mongolia, and at one point they suddenly came upon a large hydro power lake that wasn't on their map, so they had to make quite a big detour.

You will need to read the Cyrillic script.

The answers to my question over at GIS describe sources where these maps can be downloaded.